Pandemonium

“The Boy on the Rock, for example.” She stooped, picked up a picture from one of the trails I’d laid, and showed it to me. I’d found a dozen pictures of a kid maybe eleven or twelve, at a stream. Sometimes he sat with his arms around his knees, sometimes standing, about to dive, sometimes climbing up onto a boulder, a towel draped across his back. I’d first seen one of the pictures in the ICOP slideshow.

The kid wasn’t me, wasn’t Lew, didn’t seem to be any of the Hellion victims. I didn’t know what to make of him, but he seemed important to the Painter.

“He’s got the most regular features of any of the subjects,” Meg said. “Everyone’s tried to identify him, match him to a photo of somebody real. The government interviewed thousands of people back in the seventies. Lots of near misses—you can find plenty of fresh-faced boys, and even plenty in bathing suits—but no hundred-percent matches. Still, there are theories. It’s a self-portrait of the original Painter. Or he’s the Painter’s son. Or he’s the archetype of innocence, a cherub. Or he’s not even been born yet; he’s the one the Painter is waiting for.”

“To do what?”

She shrugged, smiled. “You know how it is with messiah stories.”

She set the picture down again and grunted as she stood up.

“So I’m wasting my time here,” I said.

She shook her head. “Oh no. None of us have ever had your resources. No one’s been able to ask a demon what they mean. The Painter is always silent.”

Meg came to the source pile, the clump of pictures I couldn’t sort. I kept returning to the pictures, sifting through them, waiting for the moment that something resonated, some synapse fired—and then I’d carry the picture to another part of the room. She frowned at the pile—perhaps thinking of all the work of putting these back in their binders—and moved on, her eyes following the horizontal exhibition on the floor.

“How is the boy?” Meg said casually. She didn’t mean the boy on the rock. “Do you still feel him straining to get out?” They couldn’t call him the Hellion anymore, and they wouldn’t stop calling me Del. So the person in my head was like an unnamed fetus: the boy, or just he, him.

“Quiet,” I said. He’d been silent and unmoving since the hypnosis session. I didn’t think time passed in there. He wasn’t conscious, stalking his cage and scheming his escape. He was like a fitful sleeper, and sometimes when his nightmares came on strong, or there was light coming into the cage from some hole I’d opened up, that’s when he got agitated. Since my car accident I’d been leaving the cage door open at night, and I hadn’t even known it.

After the session with the Waldheims, though, I had slammed the doors and tripled the locks. I clamped down on him as tightly as I had in those years when I thought he’d vanished—the years between Dr. Aaron’s “cure” and my plunge through the guardrail in Colorado. Now that I knew what I was doing, maybe I could hold him down for years. Maybe I could throw him so deep in the dungeon that he’d never come back up.

All I’d have to do then was live with myself.

“What’s the theory on the farmhouses?” I asked. I stood and led her to the twenty or so pictures. I picked up the most recent one. “This one I saw the Painter do at O’Hare Airport a couple weeks ago.” No, less than that—today was Tuesday. I’d arrived in Chicago ten days ago. The police or maybe a reporter had gotten an overhead picture of the popcorn–and-litter collage: the quaint clapboard house, the red silo and barn, the tree-edged fields. I was struck by the same sense of familiarity that I’d felt at the airport, but it wasn’t as strong as the pictures of Lew or Mom. It wasn’t anyplace I’d lived.

“Have you wondered about the smudge?” she said. She pointed to the dark blur in the sky above the house. At O’Hare the Painter had created it by scraping the heel of his shoe across the tile. “It’s in all the pictures.”

“It is?” I picked up another one of the series, then another. Each picture showed the same farm, but in winter, in summer, at night. And